This course introduces students to substantive criminal law, one of the three building blocks relevant to practice as a prosecutor or criminal defense attorney. Through a single, comprehensive, multi-stage case simulation, students will step into the roles of prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges. In addition to the simulation, students will also work through hypotheticals and exercises to understand the larger implications of the law and their decisions. Throughout the semester, students will explore two systems of criminal law, the common law and MPC.
Neither the common law nor the MPC are directly binding sources of criminal law. Consequently, there are no pure common law or MPC jurisdictions. To be binding law, the common law and MPC must first be adopted into statutes by legislatures. Today, U.S. criminal law reflects a combination of common law and MPC principles, with most jurisdictions leaning heavily on one or the other of these sources. The mixture of approaches makes it important for students to understand both the common law and the MPC and how they compare to one another.
All U.S. criminal law began as common law, which is judge made law. Because common law is created as a product of court decisions and judicial rulings, this led to a piecemeal patchwork of criminal laws which continued until the nineteenth century when the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited federal common law crimes in U.S. v. Hudson, 11 U.S. 32 (1812). Eventually, states followed suit and the common law was prohibited in most U.S. jurisdictions and subsequently replaced by statutes. Now all U.S. jurisdictions have a penal code, a criminal law statute. Common law jurisdictions are those that primarily adopted the traditional common law of crimes into their penal codes.
Until the mid-twentieth century, criminal law in the U.S. mainly consisted of statutes based on traditional common law. In the late 1950s, the American Law Institute published a study geared at reforming the traditional common law of crimes and published their findings as the MPC with Commentaries. MPC jurisdictions are those with penal codes primarily based on the MPC.
While this class will primarily focus on substantive criminal law (as described above) and include issues covered on bar exams, coverage in this class will go beyond learning “black letter law.” It will also include a focus on how the various doctrines work together and how lawyers use the law in practice. This practice focus means that we will use the context of a criminal trial (focusing on burdens of production and persuasion) to make the rules and doctrines understandable. During Unit 1, students will learn common elements shared by all crimes, which will underpin the multiple specific crimes covered this term. Upon completing this course, you will be able to make prosecution’s arguments for burdens of production and persuasion on a variety of crimes; defense arguments to prevent the prosecution from meeting those burdens; and arguments regarding “affirmative” defenses.
- Teacher: Michele Okoh